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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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The Demon Who, In The Process, Became A Monster
So. I've decided that I'm going to be a nice person from now on.
This decision has nothing to do with the following: I've been reading an old paperback by Robert Ressler, who used to profile serial killers for the FBI. The book, Whoever Fights Monsters, takes its title from a Nietzche quote:
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." The book covers a lot of ground (though not in a very in-depth manner) in terms of specific cases, the ways in which the FBI's profiling program came about, and how interviews with criminals are conducted. But the chapter that interests me the most deals with the childhood development of serial killers. It's basically an outline of how dysfunctional individuals (who don't become serial killers) develop. Of course, I haven't any sort of background in psychology, but the things that Ressler writes about just seem to make sense. He writes about the critical ages of development and how, at each stage, the things that go wrong create an individual that is unable to connect with other people. Between the ages of two and six, for example, the vast majority of serial killers (and dysfunctional individuals in general) are found to have had very emotionally distant mothers. He writes that they never learn how to become attached to others in a loving way as a result. From six to twelve (I think it's twelve), there is a need for a strong and loving father figure. And with dysfunctional individuals, this father figure never materializes (is absent by divorce or death, is emotionally distant, is abusive). One of the effects of these two causes (with serial killers and probably lots of other men who never get to the point of killing) is to detour what would otherwise be a normal fantasy life into violent territory. For example, one criminal Ressler writes about fantasized as a child about about being killed and eaten by a babysitter. Many of the dysfunctional men he writes about (not just serial killers) find themselves unable to have or maintain a consensual sexual relationship (or any kind of relationship in many cases) with women (or men, in the case of men who are homosexual). If they have any sort of sexual relationships at all--and a lot of them seem to be sexually impotent--they are relationships that often fail quickly or perhaps encompass violence. Because all the killers Ressler ever profiled were men, this information seems to be applicable to men only, but it's still interesting to me for several reasons. One is that the identification and development of dysfunctional individuals is intriguing. Another is that there is no real "cure" for an adult individual that has had this kind of childhood. The third is that one of my demons fits this description perfectly.
More lies:
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